Where Gods Once Stood
by solysal
Summary: Ichigo never gets his powers back. Karin takes up the family business. [AU]
1. Chapter 1

She was doing a terrible job. Ichigo muted the TV and considered his options.

Karin was his sister, and he loved her as completely and simply as he was willing to admit without punching himself in the face. That said, he didn't spend the better part of his high school career playing at delinquency to let a member of his family get away with such a piss poor excuse for breaking into her own house. If this was her setting off his metaphorical tripwire, his old man had felt it when Karin snuck out in the first place, and Yuzu had been keeping secrets since the two of them got home from school.

He heard her jog the lock a second time as he walked into the kitchen and stood by the doorway.

It had been seventeen months, but that didn't mean Ichigo hated being the last to know any less.

...

The stiff line of her shoulders gave in with the lock. Slowly, Karin let the air back into her lungs.

She wasn't hiding anything. If anyone asked her what she was doing out after the rest of Karakura Town shut the blinds and cut the lights, she told them. "Oh, you know, nothing special. Just the usual family business." It helped that the most high-profile Kurosaki was not the man her mom brought out of the mist one morning. It helped that he had a history of fistfights first and fainting spells second. It helped that no one could see him back when he chased shadows in the dark.

Besides, Yuzu already had all the details—indexed by subject and alphabetized because for every watery smile Yuzu's mind ticked with all the ruthless discipline of a mainframe. Karin wasn't even sure she could hide anything from Yuzu. Some odds and ends, maybe, but it was all bound to come out eventually. It happened when you knew someone as long as you knew yourself.

Her dad never asked, but if he did, Karin would give him three guesses, and the first two wouldn't count.

Ichigo—Ichigo didn't need to guess.

She slipped the bobby pin back into her hair and pushed the door open, squinting through the kitchen and into the living room. She thought that: a) her brother had shitty taste in television and b) it was taking way too long for her eyes to lock on his deadbeat strawberry head. She looked up.

"Hey, sis," Ichigo drawled. "You're out late. Forget your key?"

His fingers hooked under her collar and lifted her up, drawing the fabric taut against her collarbone. She scowled. "Hey, jackass, you want to try not choking me?"

"Funny. I have this really strong feeling you'll live."

Relative to her, Ichigo was a lot of things. Taller, faster, stronger—that didn't have to add up to better, but it did most days. She swung a fist out. Ichigo tipped his nose back and watched her knuckles sail past. He smirked, slow and easy, because to him, that's what this was. Fine. He was still wide open for the kick she leveled at his torso.

Karin tried to make the most out of the exceptions.

He dropped her, flinching. "Imp."

"Troll," she shot back, rearranging the creases in her shirt. "Are we done here?"

Ichigo didn't say anything, just stepped back and looked. It was the kind of look she got from her teachers—from her dad, too, when he thought she wouldn't notice—only heavier. His lips pressed into a thin line, gaze flickering from the ugly gash below her cargo shorts to the scrapes across her knuckles. She wanted to explain just how bad concern looked on him: it shadowed all the wrong lines in his face.

Instead, she took a deep breath. She was letting him see this. This, and not the dislocated shoulder Inoue had Ayame and Shinou pop back into place.

Karin wasn't hiding anything. If anyone asked her what she was doing, she told them. If she tried not to give them too much to ask about—well, that was something else.

Ichigo motioned to the kitchen table. "Sit."

She held her palms up and slumped into a chair. She yawned while he fumbled around the cabinet where their dad kept the clinic supplies. "That stuff's for patients, you know."

He threw a roll of tape at her.

"You missed," she said.

"It's the thought that counts," he replied, sitting across from her. He laid down a pack of gauze, a bandage roll, and a dark bottle of hydrogen peroxide. "Hands first."

She groaned.

"It's either me or—"

"Dad. I get it." She stuck out her arms. "I still hate you."

He moistened a wad of gauze and started dabbing. "Tell me that after you're not dying from gangrene."

"You've officially given up all rights to calling Dad dramatic. Like, ever."

He moved on to her leg, using one hand to clamp her ankle against his side before drowning her shin in hydrogen peroxide. "Standard of care still applies."

Their dad had already lined them up and run them through the basics of first aid, chock full with his take on the usual bullshit. "Some things have to hurt before they get better," he'd said, before snapping apart a badly set fracture. Yuzu had shuddered. Ichigo, from the way he was scrubbing at the raw skin on her leg, had been taking notes. Karin grimaced. Getting older did weird things to people.

Whatever flavor of damage he'd picked out for himself, Ichigo took his sweet time checking all the boxes in his version of the family trauma protocol. Karin had run through the stats of the men's and women's national football teams before he finally let her go and started cleaning up. She rocked her foot back and forth experimentally. Her knee stung less than before Ishida fished the Hollow venom out, but not by much.

Ichigo frowned at her. "Are there more?"

Of course there were—had been. She'd dealt with them. She hadn't dealt with him. Her fingers rapped an unsteady drum against the table. "You're not going to ask what happened?"

He leaned against the counter, rubbing his chin like she'd asked him what he thought about the weather in Kyoto. Like he couldn't see the point behind the question. "Not really." His smile was a crooked twist at the edge of his mouth. "You're not going to tell me?"

Karin blinked. She hadn't actually played through the idea that Ichigo wondered about the lessons he left behind, too. She'd decided, back when his world was the one hanging off the edges of hers, that half the truth was better than a lie. She'd never stopped to ask if he agreed. Her grin stretched tight across her cheeks. "Not really."

He walked past her, pausing at the base of the stairs before climbing up to his room. "Don't die out there, brat."

...

High school was just one big obstacle course. Ichigo's dad would tell him that he was too young (and probably some combination of the words 'adorable' and 'cherubic') to be cynical, but his dad also spent a lot of time getting thrown out of windows by his children and not having a real medical license. Which went to show, objectively, high school sucked balls. It was just another long list of things he had to do before he could see his friends and graduate and get the fuck on with his life.

Point in case: the location of Inoue Orihime. She'd always been sort of skittish around him, and she'd only gotten worse since they stopped seeing the world the same way. It's not like he could blame her. He never looked her in the eye whenever she stood up in the middle of class and excused herself.

That didn't change the fact that he needed to talk to her. Ichigo closed his locker and stared down the hall where his classmates were swarming near their homerooms. He caught himself wishing—uselessly—that he could key in on her reiatsu. Rukia would laugh. Even once upon a time, he'd never been any good at that sort of thing. Rukia had tried to teach him—well, a lot of things. Not like it did him any good now.

He'd find Inoue the same way as anyone else. He breathed in deep, like he was about to split a Hollow in two—

"Ichigo!"

—and let it out.

Keigo's grin was unnervingly wide as he looped an arm around Ichigo's shoulders. "What are your thoughts about baseball?"

"Not now, Keigo."

"Because I love baseball," Keigo forged on, "and I think it'd be the worst thing ever if our team missed the playoffs again—"

"Again? Last week you didn't know our high school had a baseball team."

"Talk about tragedy, right? I have to make up for three years' worth of apathy!"

"What's your angle?" Ichigo asked, not that he needed to. Keigo and he pretty much had the same sort of things going on in their lives—college entrance exams, part-time jobs, raging hormones—even if Keigo used a different scale to prioritize his battles.

"So, Kunieda was telling me about how their ace tore some muscles in his rotator cuff—"

Ichigo almost admired his honesty. "Kunieda, huh? No thanks."

"How can you be so cold? Here I am, your dearest friend, on my knees—on my knees, Ichigo! —" Keigo paused to clutch at his chest, "and you can't even pretend to hesitate?"

"It's not my job to get you laid," Ichigo replied, craning his neck on the off chance that Inoue picked the near future to slip into view. Lucky for him, she did. "I'll talk to you later. If I find my name on the sub list, seeing dead people is going to be the least of your worries."

He tuned out Keigo's protests and trained his eyes to where Inoue was making her way down the hall. She was humming in time to her music, one earbud twirling in her hands as the other students parted around her. Mizuiro always said there was something purposeful about the way Inoue moved through a crowd, like the rest of the world had no other go but to fall in step with her feet. Days like this, Ichigo could almost see it.

She took the other earbud out of her ear and waved brightly when she saw him. "Good morning, Kurosaki!"

Ichigo wasn't blind. He knew exactly how great it was that a girl like Inoue would give him the time of day, let alone swing over the full floodlights of her attention when he stopped her in the hall. Maybe some of that was dried blood and empty stretches of desert sand, but if Ichigo had to justify himself to anyone other than, well, himself, he'd say that Tatsuki was the nicest thing connecting the dots between Inoue and him these days.

Except, of course, for the issue of certain little sisters with massively overblown hero complexes. "Hey, Inoue. Can I talk to you?"

He watched the curve of her lips flatten, her foot shifting out—something she'd picked up from Rukia, or maybe Matsumoto. Seventeen months changed a lot, but not the way Inoue wore her armor. "You're talking to me now, aren't you?"

Ichigo tightened his grip on his bookbag. The singsong bent of her voice hadn't changed. He could work with that. "Right."

"There's something specific you want to talk about, of course. I hope it's the robot apocalypse. Tatsuki and I stayed up late watching The Matrix yesterday, you know."

"No wonder Tatsuki didn't notice when Mizuiro swapped their bentos."

"It wasn't very nice of Kojima to do it, and it wasn't very nice of you to let it happen." Her mouth lapsed into a pout. She schooled it back into the kind of expression that made Ichigo want to choose his next words wisely. "I think I'm out of luck, though. So, Kurosaki, what is this not-the-robot-apocalypse-thing you want to talk to me about?"

Ichigo tried to find a place on Inoue's face that wasn't her eyes. "It's Karin."

The shock worked its way up to her hand, reflexively bunched at the edge of her skirt, before she caught it and snuffed it out. "Is she alright?"

"You tell me."

Her eyes widened. "Kurosaki—"

Maybe she was right to have her guard up. His words had come out uneven. He could still taste their ridges between his teeth. He sighed, trying to grind the sharpness out of his voice. This was still Inoue. He knew her. For better or for worse. "Look, I get it. There's nothing I can—it's out of my hands."

"Don't say that," she said, something sad and heavy pulling her stare to the floor. It wasn't a protest. He liked her more for that. Neither of them had ever been any good at pretending.

"I can't do what I used to." He didn't expect it to sound so final, but he owed Karin that much. "I get that. Just—she's my sister, and she doesn't know when to be afraid. I need to know if she's in over her head. You'd tell me, wouldn't you?"

She was quiet for a long time. Ichigo could've sworn he stood there for hours, watching the beginnings of different sentences die on her lips. It reminded him of catching his parents' arguments from behind the stairs, the kitchen light throwing angry shadows against the floor. He waited. He was getting better at that.

"Ishida is training her," she told him, finally. "Urahara, too. Sado and I help out when we can. We told her we could take care of things. She wouldn't hear it." She tucked her bangs behind her ear, waiting for his reaction. "But I think you understand that part the best, don't you?"

Ichigo filled in the lines she set out. Ishida was training Karin. It wasn't like him. Or maybe it was. Ichigo appreciated jack shit about Karin's powers beyond the fact that she had them, and Ishida had a way of looking out for his own. Urahara had told him once that there was a pendulum between Shiba Isshin and Kurosaki Masaki, and each of their children was a different point along the length of its swing. If Karin took after their mom, it shouldn't be a surprise.

It shouldn't be anything, as far as he was concerned.

Inoue leaned forward into his line of view. "Kurosaki?"

"Sorry, got lost there for a sec," he apologized, running a hand over his face. "Thanks for patching her up, by the way. She barely had a scratch on her by the time she got home."

"Oh, so she decided to tell you after all!" Inoue beamed.

Ichigo grinned. "Nope. But you just did."

"Kurosaki!" she huffed, pout blooming back in full force. "You shouldn't mislead people like that! You'll get migraines!"

"How about something honest, then?" Ichigo smiled, a real one this time. "Thanks, Inoue. It means—just—thanks."

Like everything else, Inoue folded the words into her orbit. "There's nothing to say thank you for, Kurosaki."

Her reply was an anchor to Hueco Mundo, weighted with the sound of her voice screaming his name, the give of his fist scissoring through the space where a heart should be. There were layers—you can talk to me, and, I'm sorry, and please don't worry—but Ichigo wasn't about to unpack all of that before his calculus test first period. "The Hollows are getting stronger, aren't they?"

Inoue tipped her head to the side. "Karin hasn't told you?"

"Not a word," Ichigo shrugged. "She's just a bad liar."

Inoue laughed, a rush of air hushed against the heel of her hand. "You weren't much better, Kurosaki."

...

Of course Yuzu had her report ready. The day Yuzu turned in an assignment late, the principal would probably send one of the students out to check if the sun was still shining.

"Kurosaki Yuzu," their teacher announced, "I look forward to reading another excellent essay. If only your sister could learn from your example."

Yuzu offered Karin an apologetic wince on her way back to her seat. Karin rolled her eyes. The next time a Hollow tried to bite her teacher's head off, she'd grab some pocky and watch it happen—even if she could already hear the lecture Ishida would proceed to slingshot her way.

"A soul consumed by a Hollow won't return," her mental version of him scolded, sounding way too pious for someone who was still a teenager. "Forget your differences for the greater good."

Well, the greater good was currently failing her out of Feudal Japanese, so they weren't entirely on speaking terms. Not everyone could be Kurosaki Ichigo, full-time honors student, part-time Shinigami. It wasn't healthy. The universe just happened to stuff her between two perfect children. This afternoon was one out of a shit ton of calling cards.

The end-of-day bell rang, and Karin almost missed their teacher's sendoff as she elbowed into the mob of students bolting for the door. "Kurosaki Karin, I'll expect your report on my desk first thing Monday morning."

To her credit, Karin managed to wait till she was three full doors down before she let loose. "That motherfucking sadist! Why couldn't she have just failed me like a normal person?"

Yuzu bumped shoulders with her in the hall. "Most people would be happy to get a second chance, you know."

"Yeah? Well most people don't have—"

"Boot camp this weekend?" There were a lot of things about Jinta that Karin didn't understand: why he gelled his hair back like a washed-up gangster, why he picked Urahara over Tessai for parent-teacher conferences, why he thought he could hide the way his eyes got all soft when they landed on Yuzu—oh, gross. It was happening right now. "Hey, Yuzu."

"Hey, Jinta!" Yuzu greeted, throwing up a peace sign and simultaneously outing herself as the true heir to their dad's misconceptions about normal human interaction. "Don't keep Karin too long, okay? She's got to make up a report this weekend."

"Oh, yeah?" Jinta squinted pointedly at Yuzu's shoes. "I'll, uh, see what I can work out with the old man."

"You will? You're the best, Jinta!" Yuzu turned to Karin, perfectly blind to the blush radiating across Jinta's cheeks. "That means no excuses for missing dinner, Karin."

Karin wished she could teleport both of them into the sun. "Roger that."

Yuzu saluted. "See you tonight, Karin! Later, Jinta!"

To his credit, Jinta only wasted a few seconds gawking after Yuzu before nodding to the exit. "Ururu's outside. You ready?"

Karin tapped her cheek. Jinta lost points for falling disgustingly head-over-heels for her sister, but he also owned bragging rights to the meanest corner kick in Karakura. Better to pay it forward. "Lead the way, " she said.

...

Unlike Inoue, Chad was an easy find. He was sprawled out on the school roof, somehow more solid than the whole building and the earth below it.

"School got out, like, two hours ago," Ichigo said, shutting the door to the stairwell behind him.

"That so?" Chad didn't look back when he replied, eyes stuck on whatever the fuck was above them. Ichigo hoped it wasn't a Hollow.

"Must be one hell of a sunset."

"Why don't you find out yourself?"

He lay back next to Chad, stretching his neck until the only thing he could see were cloudless blues and washed-out reds. Karakura didn't have much, but it knew how to make night fall like nowhere else. "I hate it when you're right."

"I'm always right."

"Everyone who thinks you're nice is tripping balls. You're such an ass."

Ichigo felt more than heard Chad's laugh, a deep rumble that shook Chad's shoulders and settled easily under Ichigo's skin. He couldn't remember when he started waiting for the brace of Chad's back against his own in a fight, and—well. It had never been hard with Chad—even after everything else was.

"I talked to Inoue today," he said.

"You're still worried."

Ichigo managed to block out a lot of things about his life since half the world clocked out of it, but this part was certified, irredeemable bullshit: the part where he hung back and annotated Macbeth while his little sister and his best friends came this short of killing themselves trying to keep him safe. He hadn't really figured out how to just stand there and believe in someone else. He wasn't sure he wanted to. "Karin hasn't come home hurt before," he replied.

"I'm sorry." The trick to talking to Chad was to listen for the half of the conversation he was having with himself. Chad's nails cut dull crescents into his palms, like the first time Ichigo found him tied to a chair, black-eyed and bloody and quoting his grandfather. Ichigo remembered thinking that Chad had a weakness for unreasonable promises.

"I don't blame you. You know that." Ichigo sighed, blowing the air though his nose. "Karin got into enough trouble before she started chasing ghosts out of trees."

"Something is pushing the Hollows out of Hueco Mundo," Chad said, considering and setting aside Ichigo's reprieve as easily as if Ichigo had brought him a pair of shoes that didn't fit. It'd be endearing if it wasn't so aggravating. "Urahara has his theories."

Ichigo scoffed. "I bet he's told you all about them."

Chad was halfway through a shrug when every line in his body filed into focus. He was on his feet in the time it took Ichigo's stomach to drop through the floor. Ichigo scrambled after him, the sound of his voice drowned out under the thudding in his ears. "Is it Karin?"

Chad held up a hand and stalked to the edge of the roof, glaring at the empty expanse of the horizon—at something Ichigo couldn't see at all.

...

Karin really didn't like sparring with Ururu. Not in an irrational, gut-deep way. A practical one. Jinta was the easier fight. His kanabou had a tendency to send her flying, but at least he stomped around the training ground at a pace her eyes could follow. Ururu blurred to the other side of the field, far enough out of arm's reach that Karin indulged herself in the heady luxury of trying to come up with a game plan. That is, until Ururu started pelting her with cannon fire.

"Oh, fuck," Karin said.

"Now might be a good time to try using Hirenkyaku," Ishida called out.

"Too bad you can't ditch that pesky body and shunpo to safety," Urahara crowed.

Regardless of whether she sparred with Jinta or Ururu, that freed up Urahara and Ishida to backseat drive the hell out of her heartfelt efforts not to get blown up. She scowled at where they stood in a moving demonstration of her total lack of appreciation.

"Increasing power level to thirty percent. Target locked," Ururu declared, planting her feet wide and hoisting her Thousand Soul-Killing Cannon over her shoulder.

Karin tried to ignore the chill that ran down her spine. It was hard to think of Ururu as anything other than not human when she started listing her stats in percentages.

"It's fine if you don't feel comfortable using Hirenkyaku yet. The most important thing right now is for you to get out of the way," Ishida said.

"Our dear Ururu is so fast though," Urahara tutted from behind his fan. "If only you knew some way to craft a barrier."

Karin bit her lip. Tessai had taught her the basics of kidou earlier in the week—funneling her reiatsu outside her body, curling it into bizarre shapes and loops. His homework consisted of memorizing a few simple incantations with the explicit caveat of not taking them out for a test drive before his next session. Well, Karin mused, savoring the crackle of gathering power beneath her skin, better to go out swinging. "Bakudou Number Eight: Repulse!" she shouted

"Firing," Ururu intoned, unleashing an orange storm of rocket missiles that whipped her hair back and flung cold light into her eyes.

Karin's reiatsu flickered into a translucent sheet, and she swallowed the laughter burbling at the back of her throat. She was hiding behind a glorified pane of glass. When the artillery hit, she already had her arms up to shield herself from the blowback. It didn't help. She came to wondering 1) what throwing out your back felt like and 2) if she'd managed to do it.

"Fuck. Kidou," she concluded after some deliberation.

Ishida's head loomed into view. "You know, Ichigo was terrible at kidou too."

Karin wanted to scream. Seventeen months ago, she'd thought of Ishida as that one friend of Ichigo's with a penchant for embroidery and a stick up his ass. Now, she thought of Ishida as that one friend of Ichigo's with a penchant for draconian training regimens and a habit of frowning like he wasn't sure if he should yell at her or the sky-high expectations her brother left behind. Which was all a nice way of saying that the stick had somehow migrated further up his ass.

"I could train you in the more hands-on Shinigami arts," Urahara interjected, crowding her as Ishida helped her to her feet, "But first we'd have to, ah, snip-snip your soul chain—"

"Because that worked so well with Ichigo."

"My, my, dear Ishida," Urahara said, dusting imaginary specks of dust from Karin's hair. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you had a grudge."

Ishida's laugh was knife-edged and humorless. "You act like it's some kind of secret."

The air went thick with reiatsu, stuck to the roof Karin's mouth no matter how hard her chest heaved. Urahara was stronger—she knew that with the absolute certainty that she reserved for things like Yuzu's birthday and Kunishige Kamamoto's career score count—but Ishida was angrier. Her gaze darted across the arena. Ururu had re-leveled the barrel of her cannon: one eye shut, one finger on the trigger.

"You gave his Hollow a path to the outside world."

"Kurosaki Ichigo had a Hollow well before he became interested in playing Shinigami. Or did you honestly think his prodigious reiatsu was some happy accident?" Urahara asked, stepping away from Karin and peering at Ishida under the rim of his hat.

"Inoue almost died. And Ichigo—"

"Ichigo is alive, as is the rest of Karakura Town."

"Even children know how to clean up after themselves," Ishida spat, staggering on the edge of a shout. "Don't congratulate yourself."

No one had ever explained to Karin why Ichigo had come home one day and started walking through dead people like everyone else. She'd lost count of the number of people who had promised to reel out the whole story-always one day, soon, when she could take it. Yuzu lost a lot of sleep over how fucked up it was that Karin had to earn the right to hear the truth. That no one, not even Ichigo, would just tell her.

Yuzu was also a big proponent of picking your battles, and even if Urahara and Ishida tore out each other's throats, they weren't about to pull the curtain on who Karin had to make pay for wrenching the fire out of her brother. Plus, Tessai would probably appreciate the lack of property damage.

"Well, if you guys are fighting, that means it's time for me to go," she announced loudly. "I'll stop by again tomorrow."

Ishida and Urahara broke from each other to stare down at her. Karin didn't have to wonder if her next breath would come easy. Neither of them would intentionally choke her to death. They had just forgotten she was there. That was sort of the theme with Ichigo.

"Of course," Ishida nodded.

"I'll be waiting for you bright and early!" Urahara hummed, patting her head.

Karin batted his arm away, found her backpack, and trekked up to the shop's exit. Tessai met her at the door with a wrapped bento. "I apologize for our rudeness," he said, bowing deeply. "It seems there is bad blood between us yet."

Karin smiled despite herself. "It's fine, Tessai."

"Take the bento, at least. We've kept you well into the evening, and it would hardly do if you starved to death."

"I know I complain about her a lot, but Yuzu's not a monster. She'll make sure I eat."

"Something to snack on, then," Tessai insisted. "These exercises take their toll, and I want you at your best when I show you what went wrong with the kidou spell you attempted today."

"Right," Karin cringed, the crash and burn of her jerry-rigged barrier flashing before her eyes. She shook her head and grabbed the bento. "Till tomorrow, then, old man."

Karin wasn't being careless when she assumed the walk home would be a quiet one. Hollows generally steered clear of the Urahara Shop. Whether that was due to self-preservation or something more deliberate was anyone's guess. Hollows didn't exactly give out interviews. Still, Ishida would kill her if she let her guard down completely. She compromised by picking up her pace as she peeked inside the contents of Tessai's bento box. It was just her luck that she was in the middle of decoding his sushi mosaic when reality cracked.

An oil black gulf stretched the sky, cutting jagged seams with edges rolled up like parchment into the clouds. Dimly, Karin realized she had her Quincy Cross in hand. Figures she'd bite the dust right when all her hard work was starting to pay off. There were only a few things that could create a path out of the afterlife, and none of them were even remotely in her weight class. She didn't have any illusions about what to do next (she wasn't strong enough to be impractical, and that, more than anything else was what Yoruichi said would keep her alive). She would run. She'd get a read on what was so dead set on gnashing her into little pieces, and then she'd run with everything she had.

The shriek of torn sheet metal clawed through the breeze. Karin covered her ears and looked.

Kuchiki Rukia stepped across the hole she'd punched in the world. A grin split her face, like fissures through an ice floe. "Prepare to die, child."


	2. Chapter 2

Ichigo felt like livewire. Like every nerve in his body was brilliantly, worthlessly on fire. His knuckles flexed around the shape of a hilt that wasn't there, straining for the weight of his soul shaped into steel.

Rukia—fucking professional as ever—had done this. He tried to remember her neatly roping herself off to the sidelines while he ran around with her sword in his hands. Yeah, right. There were frequencies of sound he would never hear again thanks to her (the strangest thing in Soul Society was how quietly she'd stood before the Soukyoku). Maybe it was a little late for him to start empathizing, but Rukia always said he was a slow learner. If she could do this, Ichigo sure as hell could try.

He shifted his focus outward. The same stale air slouched across Karakura Town; the same setting sun ripped shadows through the asphalt. Ichigo walked to the edge of the roof. Chad was a compass hung between the school and the sky: the only break in the slow shutter of nightfall.

Then, like wiping the blood off a knife, Chad stretched.

"What. The. Fuck," Ichigo said.

"It's Karin," Chad replied, gesturing broadly towards the horizon. It was the kind of half-assed vagueness Chad slid into whenever he got stuck telling a story with more details than he could bother to commit to memory. It was his way of saying that Karin was fine and in one piece and alive but also Karin was fine and in one piece and alive what else was there.

Ichigo immediately and simultaneously wanted to laugh with sheer, bone-crushing relief and burn every single one of Chad's Hawaiian shirts. Fine. Chad was going to make him to pull teeth? Ichigo would be a goddamn dentist. "You're not going to head over?"

Chad turned to face him, arms crossed like he was the head of the KGB and Ichigo had just demanded the nuclear launch codes. "No need."

"Why not?"

Chad's lips twitched. It was as good as the most shit-eating grin in the world. "She's meeting an old friend."

Chad didn't throw up a billboard with 'Rukia' in blinking lights, but as far as old friends with a weakness for dramatic entrances, Ichigo could only name a handful who would willingly hang around outside of Soul Society, and only one with a vested interest in Karin.

"You," Ichigo said, enunciating each word clearly, "are a complete and utter shithead. Do you know how many existential crises I went through while you were standing there brooding at the horizon?"

Chad found his bookbag and slung it over his shoulder. "There was a cloud that looked like Kon."

Chad bore Ichigo's subsequent attempt to wrestle him into a headlock with a manfully solemn grace as he descended the stairs. Ichigo figured he would've had better luck dropkicking a black hole. Still, it was a matter of principle.

...

Karin was fairly certain there had been some point in her life when things had been easy. When the only things she had to worry about was whether Gamba Osaka would make it to the Emperor's Cup and how to discreetly scrap her dad's latest batch of charred stir-fry. Rukia didn't personally flip the switch on Karin's life, but she jammed herself into the overall problem with a terrifying enthusiasm.

"Hey, look, could we maybe do this some other time?" Karin pleaded, hurling herself away from another jagged arc of white lightning. "I've got, like, two reports and an exam next week, and you know how much I love doing this with you, I really do—"

Rukia, lounging impossibly on an empty stretch of atmosphere, pushed herself up. "Hadou Number Sixty Three: Thunder Roar Cannon!"

Karin was already sprinting before the incantation ended. She chanced a backwards glance at the messy circle of scorched earth that marked where she'd stood. "That almost hit me!" she yelled, conjuring her bow and drawing the string taut. "What would you have done if I had actually died?"

Rukia's lashes batted low, like she was trying to cross a swamp without messing the hem of her kimono. "Buried you," she said.

Karin didn't believe for a second that terrorizing schoolchildren was anywhere on the list of esteemed shinigami responsibilities and earnestly looked forward to the day Kuchiki Rukia got her head out of her ass. Yuzu, though—Yuzu didn't believe in simple things. She had lined up a series of facts for Karin, threading brass tacks into analog until she built a pattern. It went like this.

Fact One: seventeen months ago, the air pressure in Karakura Town had blistered and burst in the span of a single evening. There was a brief period in the following week where Ichigo kept asking Karin what she was staring at. He stopped after a few days. Fact Two: thirteen months ago, Inoue had found Karin up the creek with a Hollow after luring it away from a funeral procession. Inoue rang for Sado, Sado rang for Ishida, and Karin opened her eyes to Inoue's hairpins burning the monster off a ghost. Fact Three: Twelve months, three weeks, and six days ago, Kuchiki Rukia had stepped into the middle of Karin and Yuzu's bedroom and drawn her sword.

"It's kind of sweet," Yuzu had said, after Karin, bagged out and prematurely sore, hauled herself back through their window. Karin had reminded herself that Yuzu also tutored trigonometry and regularly conscripted Kon into modeling her dolls' clothes.

If this was Rukia's way of calling, she needed to start using a phone Ichigo could pick up.

Karin sliced arrows from her Reiatsu and let them fly. Rukia flitted just out of their path, instantly bright as they clipped past. She shook her head as they faded out behind her. As long as Rukia drew out the range of their blows, Karin was stuck on the wrong side of a ridiculously steep learning curve.

Karin shifted her foot out, drinking in her surroundings. "If you can't win," Yoruichi had told her, "cut your losses." If Rukia went for broke—filled a circle with Sode no Shirayuki, plied the breadth of her kidou—Karin was shit out of luck. If Rukia didn't—hid her full hand, played with her food—Karin was still shit out of luck but with options.

Karin closed in, loosing shot after shot as she went. The least she could do was force Rukia to move, to cage her mind into evasions and counters and out of the more destructive corners of her arsenal. Rukia staggered forward, and a sharp stab of satisfaction pulled at Karin's lips. Ishida always said Karin had good aim if nothing else.

"Your drawings suck!" Karin shouted. If she could goad Rukia into charging, then—

"I'll have to ask you to repeat yourself." Rukia's voice was sugar in a snowstorm, swelling over Karin's shoulder. At Karin's back, Sode no Shirayuki slid free of its sheath. "I'm certain I heard you correctly, but I've been told infants have a worrying tendency to misspeak."

Karin had always known, intellectually, that Rukia was fast. The firsthand experience was still pretty sobering. She slammed a lid on the hiss of panic building in her gut. This wasn't how she wanted it to happen—Rukia in front of her in one moment, behind her in the next—but Rukia was within reach. Arms straight at her sides, Karin bent Reiatsu into her Quincy Cross. Then, with the steel-headed clarity that grabbed hold of her during her better penalty kicks and that one time she had to steer Sado into a hollow, she turned and fired an arrow from the palm of her hand. The flare of impact swallowed Rukia's face before Karin could make out its expression. Still, the little she had seen looked pretty damn surprised.

When the dust cleared, Rukia was inspecting a deep gouge above her elbow. Blood ran freely down to her fingertips. She let the limb hang limp. "Not bad. It seems you have some sense of self-preservation after all," she said.

Karin swallowed her disappointment. Except for her arm, Rukia was largely unscathed. "I'll be sure to put it on my résumé."

Rukia's brow scrunched as she considered and discarded the unfamiliar word. At least, that's what Karin assumed, because the next thing Rukia did was raise her uninjured arm and bore a cavern into the sky. "Until next time, Kurosaki Karin."

"There really doesn't have to be a next time!" Karin called out after her.

No good. Without looking back, Rukia vanished out of the Living World. Karin sighed and began to gather her things, thrown to the side when Rukia had first ambushed her. Tidy little pieces of sushi littered the ground. Karin toed one of them with her shoe. So much for Tessai's bento.

...

Kuchiki Rukia stepped out of the Living World and into the Court of Pure Souls.

She never failed to notice the consistency of the air in Karakura Town. The transition to the Living World was usually like passing from a rainforest into a desert: the absence of Reishi parched the lips, desiccated the lungs. The atmospheric density in Karakura Town, however, sat in perfect balance with Soul Society. Rukia used to blame Ichigo, but even now, the air was the same. Ichigo was no longer the strangest thing about his home. In hindsight, perhaps he never was.

Renji was waiting for her out by one of the stone paths that led to the Captain Commander's office, his tattooed eyebrows clashing spectacularly with the austere office buildings that marked the outer edge of the First Division. He raised one at her as she strode past. Like she should be surprised. Like she was still counting all the ways he was woven into her skin after the better part of two centuries. She hadn't breathed a word to anyone outside of Captain Ukitake regarding her audience with the Captain Commander, but of course Renji was here. Of course.

He fell into step beside her with the same lazy familiarity that one-sided and growth spurts and a series of meteoric promotions through the Shinigami ranks had failed to root out. "You're doing it backwards, you know," he said. "Most people grow out of being bullies.

Rukia wished desperately that she was taller—that she could simply look down her nose at Renji rather than suffer the inefficiency of waiting until he ambled a few paces ahead to land a well-aimed kick at his back. She pitched her reply to carry over the sound of his sputtering. "Kurosaki Karin is a perfectly capable fighter. Besides, you had no qualms sparring with Hitsugaya Toushirou last week."

Renji settled for balefully rubbing his back after trying and failing to jostle her into a nearby statue. "He's a captain."

"He's also a child."

"He's been a kid for fifty years!"

"And?"

"Fine, fine, as long as you don't kill her, it's not my problem," Renji said, waving his hands like he could flick away the admonishment that would land on his head in the event that Rukia accidentally murdered Kurosaki Ichigo's younger sister. He leaned towards her, squinting at the sleeve of her robe. "Not that I think it's a bad look or anything, but you gonna do something about that arm?"

Rukia peered down her side, the dull sting haunting every swing of her arm roaring to the front of her mind. She cast a hasty healing spell to cauterize the wound, slinging a sidelong glare in Renji's direction. "What are you? My mother?"

Renji seemed entirely too pleased for someone who was effectively nursing the beginnings of a large bruise on his tailbone. "Nah, you're older than me, remember?"

Rukia quickened her pace. The length of Renji's stride meant that, short of sprinting, her chances of outstripping him were slim, but she indulged the whim anyway. "Then why are you following me?"

"Besides the fact that you're bleeding all over the First Division?" he asked. "I'm accompanying you. For moral support."

Rukia narrowed her eyes, facing Renji fully. If she slipped the entirety of their history under a magnifying glass, she could run her fingers over the fault lines of an old fracture. The blame never sat comfortably no matter where she placed it—whether she left it at growing up, or the Gotei Thirteen, or, worst of all, both their feet. The only point she could dissect with any clarity was the flash of Renji's teeth over her brother's shoulder and the blanching of Ichigo's blood in the rain. She had lifted her artificial body's head and found a film over the moon.

Which meant that, for all that Renji was as much a part of her as the Reishi that built her spine, moments like this, where he was artless and uncomplicated in a way she hadn't realized she'd forgotten, poached all the light in her mind's eye. Which meant that, between chasing after her brother like a headless red rooster, Renji had actually sat down and collected the words to explain himself instead of stumbling over an epiphany in the middle of a battlefield. Which meant that Renji remembered that the last time Rukia had held herself before Yamamoto Genryuusai he had been presiding over her execution.

In all, Renji was as perfectly frustrating as he had been the day she had first crashed into him on a threadbare Rukongai street.

"I'm not a child," she muttered at length.

"Right, right, and I'm not your mom either," Renji said, crossing his wrists behind his head with the unruffled magnanimity of an emperor raising the annual tithe. "I got it. I'll grab Captain Kuchiki and head back."

Every thought in Rukia's head came to a screeching halt. "MY BROTHER IS COMING?"

Renji leered. "Cleared his schedule and everything. I guess he'll just have to go back to managing his accounts now."

The still functioning reserves of Rukia's brain made note that Renji should be suspended from the ceiling for the doodling pleasure of the Eleventh Division's Vice Captain. "He'll do no such thing!"

"Come on, Rukia, don't be an asshole. The Captain lives for that shit."

"He'll do no such thing," Rukia shouted, "because he will be attending the meeting!"

"I'm glad to have your permission."

Rukia swiveled to the entrance of the Captain Commander's suite. Kuchika Byakuya, in the full force of his eminence, had poised himself along the wall like a worryingly keen ornamental sword. She bowed at the waist, affecting the dignity that always seemed to flee the room whenever her brother was in it.

Byakuya nodded to the doorway. "Shall we?"

...

Ichigo flopped across Unagiya's couch and flipped open his phone. "So, Boss, what's on the menu?"

Unagiya thumbed through a thick sheaf of papers, calling out orders as she went. "There's a Mr. and Mr. Minamoto who need a babysitter for their toddler, Mrs. Fuwa who wants help replacing her AC filters, Ms. Ayase who specifically requests a tall, dark stranger to test out the springs in her mattress—"

"One of those is clearly not like the others," Ichigo cut in.

"I will have you know that Ms. Ayase is a perfectly respectable young lady with an absolutely divine mattress," Unagiya replied, placidly.

"If you already did the job then why the hell are you reading it out to me?"

"To let you know what you missed out on while you were off skipping work," she said. "Oh, Unagiya, the soccer team just can't make nationals without me! Oh, Unagiya, it's the spring qualifiers, and the baseball team needs a pinch hitter! Do you honestly expect me to believe you're good at that many sports?"

"Well, yeah, actually," Ichigo said, finishing a text to Yuzu telling her not to wait up for him. "Kids these days—ow!"

Unagiya pinched the lobe of Ichigo's ear. "I can't tell if you're a really good liar or some sort of athletic demigod, and frankly, I don't care as long as you give me some advance notice, got it?"

"Okay! Okay! I got it!"

Unagiya released his ear and sat back in her chair. "Good. Now, what am I putting you down for?"

Ichigo fired off another text, this time telling Karin not to be late to dinner under penalty of death. "I need a list of emergency contacts and a play-by-play of their bedtime routine for the kid. AC filter's are easy."

"Done and done. The Minamotos just need you for tomorrow night. No strict timetable for Ms. Fuwa. She just wants it done by the end of the week."

Ichigo scrolled through his contacts until he landed on Ishida. If Ishida's cell, was actually Urahara Shop merch the chances of a text message getting through were slim, but Ichigo hadn't been able to get a hold of him at school and he was running out of ideas. "Cool. Anything I can help with here?"

Unagiya snatched his phone out of his hands. "Nope! You're good to go once you tell me what's got you so wound up like—"

"Like a mattress spring?"

"If Kaoru overhears you and I have to give him The Talk," she threatened, dangling his phone over her coffee mug, "you're going to be on toilet cleaning duty for the next three months."

"He had to find out somehow!" Ichigo protested. He tracked the wobble of his phone in Unagiya's grip. It was an old phone, but he really, really couldn't afford to get a new one.

"Spill," she pressed, snapping his phone shut and tossing it in his lap. Her mouth scrunched to the side in what Ichigo had come to recognize as Unigiya's weirdly specific brand of morse code. It said Unigiya pegged Ichigo for an absolute little shit on the best of days but right now she was listening.

This had happened a few times before—the sudden undeniable proof that besides being frequently terrifying and nominally his boss, Unagiya was somebody's mom, and a part of her was always preternaturally aware that he was somebody's kid. It was like plummeting, shell-shocked and exposed, from the depths of space back to earth. Ichigo used to console himself with the hope that some facial tick was giving him away, but he had spent enough time frowning at his reflection to confirm that there wasn't an additional wrinkle that separated his usual scowl from his I-am-worried-about-my-sister-dying-a-gruesome-death-vis-à-vis-pissed-off-ghosts scowl. Unagiya was just that good.

If he rolled out the whole story—I used to see dead people, my sister and best friends fight dead people, my dad is technically a dead person—Unagiya probably wouldn't buy it, but she would probably believe that he bought it and that would land him in an entirely different bed of hot water. She'd catch him in an outright lie, too, so Ichigo leaned into the hazy ambiguity that his dad had declared a "scourge on all unfortunate guardians of the teenage population."

"Um, so," he began tentatively, "this isn't exactly my first part time job."

"Is it money problems?" Unagiya interjected. "Do you need to go off the grid? You can't hide out here, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't know a guy. I'm guessing you'd need three months at most. All debt collectors give up eventually!"

Ichigo inspected her chain of thought, pressing down on its supports to see if it could support his watered down version of the truth. It wasn't like anything better was about to come his way. "They're not after me?" he tried. "They're after my sister?"

Unagiya slammed her hands on her knees. "Scum of the earth! You offered up your sister as collateral?"

"No!" If I had to offer someone up for collateral, it would clearly be my fucking deadbeat of an old man, Ichigo thought matter-of-factly, but that was neither here nor there. He scrounged up a streak of indignation, hoping it would detangle the admittedly natural twist in Unagiya's logic. "Where the hell is your mind going?"

"I'm sorry, Ichigo," Unagiya said, and Ichigo couldn't for the life of him read how serious she was, "but I have no intention of discussing my dark past with you."

"As if I care how many skeletons you have in your closet!"

"You should! Your trusting nature is probably what landed you in this mess to begin with!"

He blinked, turning over her words like a bullet extracted from between his ribs. Ishida would probably agree with her. Fuck, _Ichigo_ might have thought twice if he'd realized the cost of taking down Aizen included shoving Karin into the line of fire. Then again, crying about the fine print on his life choices wouldn't do jack to stop it from biting him in the ass. "Look, can we just—" he sighed, running a hand through his hair. "I just thought I knew what my sister was up against, but I don't. I don't think anyone does."

Unagiya swirled her coffee, clouding into a stillness that sat uneasily against the bright plastic and laminate of her living room. Ichigo wasn't afraid of the skeletons she had in her closet, but he'd be lying if he said he didn't think she had a few. "Let me tell you something, Ichigo," she said. "You might think you're done with being a kid, but this world is a lot older than you. There's not much out there that's completely new."

"So maybe this isn't new," Ichigo allowed. "I'm still back where I started if no one I know has ever heard of it."

"I'm just asking you to think, Ichigo." Unagiya set her mug down and steepled her hands together beneath her chin. "Have you really asked everyone?"

If he was going to split hairs about it, Ichigo had really only asked two people. Still, Chad and Inoue had inherited pretty much the same network Ichigo had relied on back when he was the one charging off into the unknown. If they didn't know what was shelling all the Hollows out of Hueco Mundo, that meant that Soul Society _and_ Urahara were grasping at straws. He still hadn't checked in with Ishida, but for all that Ishida had a taste for poorly timed bouts of secrecy, Ichigo trusted that Ishida would fucking share when it counted. Well, mostly. Even Ishida had a few cards in his hand that he only played as a last resort.

"Well, not everyone," Ichigo answered, finally. He swung open his phone and redrafted his message to Ishida, exchanging the original wall of text for a finger guns emoji. He smirked over his phone at Unagiya. "Thanks, Boss!"

Ishida was going to be so mad.

...

The door to the Captain Commander's office closed behind her, and Rukia strained against the newly leaden weight of her bones.

"My, my, what a formidable group of warriors, come to harangue a man in his old age," Yamamoto Genryuusai greeted, as if he could dismiss the searing waves of his Reiryoku filling the room to bursting with words alone. "To what do I owe the honor?"

Rukia bent at the waist, then held the column of her spine as straight as her ligaments and tendons would allow. "I thank you for your time, Captain Yamamoto. I wish to bring to your attention the recent change in hollow migration patterns."

Yamamoto let his gaze fall on Rukia, then to Byakuya and Renji on either side of her. "I am always happy to offer my counsel, Vice Captain Kuchiki Rukia. And what of your entourage? Kuchiki Byakuya, in what capacity do you stand before me?"

Byakuya inclined his head. "As both the head of the Kuchiki Clan and the Captain of the Sixth Division. I vouch for Kuchiki Rukia's integrity as my sister and a fellow member of the Gotei 13. She would not bring this matter to your attention if she did not have strong cause to believe it a threat."

"Is your vice captain here at your behest?" Yamamoto asked.

"I'm just here for the fireworks," Renji replied, saluting cheerily.

The Captain Commander directed a long, withering look at Renji before motioning to Rukia. "Proceed."

"Sir," Rukia began. "As you know, typically, Hollows who have gathered sufficient strength move from the Living Realm to Hueco Mundo. With the exception of the recent war's interference, most remain within Hueco Mundo and continue to consolidate power. The Arrancar have developed their own form of government and seem content to vie for dominance within it."

"And you wish to tell me," Yamamoto mused, "that something has upset this balance?"

"I've surveyed reports from our operatives in the Living World, and there have been an increasing number of Hollow attacks requiring the intervention of vice-captain and captain level Shinigami," Rukia said. "Sir, Hollows are leaving Hueco Mundo."

"It is true, that by itself, the trend that you report are troubling." Yamamoto stroked his beard, considering. "However, the scope of Aizen Sousuke's machinations were not limited to a single realm. Soul Society is still righting itself in the wake of his efforts. Is it so strange to think that Hueco Mundo might be doing the same?"

Rukia wondered how familiar grief was to Yamamoto Genryuusai that he could fit all of Aizen's misery and ruin into such neat words. "There was a similar spike in Hollow appearances across the Living World preceding Aizen Sousuke's invasion. If we have learned anything from his offensive, it is that, for an individual of sufficient strength, Hueco Mundo can serve as a nearly insurmountable base of operations."

"A fair point," Yamamoto allowed. "However, the Onmitsukido runs regular reconnaissance missions to Hueco Mundo. They have seen no disturbances."

"Those are quick survey details," Rukia pushed back. "Soul Society hasn't done a dedicated sweep of Hueco Mundo in at least a year—"

"Kuchiki Rukia," Yamamoto cut in, "you were nearly a casualty of Aizen Sousuke's war. In the seventeen months since his defeat, you have surpassed yourself. You have proven yourself a Kidou Master and seized the vice-captain seat of your division. My own vice-captain tells me there is a not insubstantial pool amongst the Gotei 13 as to when you will introduce us to your bankai." He smiled then, gathering a curtain of scars and wrinkles alongside his eyes. "I did not think it possible, but you have made me all the more sorry for my indiscretion."

"That's not—I mean—"

"Aizen took from all of us, some more acutely than others," Yamamoto continued. His smile faded, replaced with a solemn line. "I know you carry the losses of the ryoka, Kurosaki Ichigo, like your own, but you should not dream shadows in the name of keeping him safe."

"Sir, if I may," Rukia said, clawing through the flesh of herself until she found the bone, "I swore an oath as a Shinigami to protect the Living World. As did you."

Yamamoto brought his pipe to his lips and inhaled deeply. Rukia noticed, absently, that the pipe wasn't lit. The smell of singed hair filled the room as he blew smoke from his nostrils. "Bring me concrete evidence that there is something afoot in Hueco Mundo. Otherwise, consider this matter closed."

"Captain Commander!" Rukia exclaimed. Byakuya caught her eye and shook his head. She fisted her hands and choked the anger out of her voice. "Then I will take my leave."

It's not that she had thought this would be easy. For all that she was a Vice Captain, her standing amongst the Gotei Thirteen had only been restored by fighting in a war that had started by branding her a criminal. For all that she was a Kuchiki, no amount of learned propriety could wipe away the years she'd spent starving in the Lower Districts. So she had armed herself—indexed report after report, hounded all the data experts in the Twelfth Division, gotten herself investigated by the Onmitsukido—and for what? As if the blades of her logic could whittle a hole into two thousand years of caution and habit. As if she would ever be anything more than a slum brat.

As Rukia walked out, Renji and Byakuya at her heels, Sode no Shirayuki roared.

...

Ryuuken fished a crumpled piece of paper from his white coat as he navigated the final lattice of turns that separated the hospital from his home. He reviewed the list of admissions to his inpatient service for the umpteenth time since he had coaxed himself out of bed that morning. All stable, all in various stages of recovery. He scheduled an alarm in his phone to hound his residents to follow up Mrs. Kanzaki's sputum cultures. She had pleaded relentlessly until she had extracted a promise from him to return home in time for her granddaughter's birthday. Anyone who had gone as long as she had trying to pass off florid pneumonia as a stubborn cough deserved a stern remediation on the components of a healthy baseline, but otherwise, she was improving remarkably. Pending her culture results, she would get her wish.

He folded the paper once again and placed it back in his pocket. He winced and rubbed his temples as the beginnings of a tension headache howled into life. He would have to set out some tea for himself when he got home. All things considered, perhaps it was well and good that Ishida had no intention of following in his footsteps.

He stopped at the street corner, his driveway peeking into view. Someone stood at the gate, lounging against one of the posts with a book in hand. Ryuuken lifted the hinges on his spiritual awareness, feeling a bone-deep weariness take hold of him as the reiatsu signature identified itself.

"Yo," his visitor waved, utterly guileless and perfectly at home in the shadow of a stranger's door, "is it cool if I hang out for a bit?"

Really, Kurosaki Ichigo resembled his mother in the worst of ways.


	3. Chapter 3

Holy fuck. Ishida was _rich_.

Ichigo had always suspected it (see: what normal high school student picked embroidery as a hobby), but like, shit. Ishida had left out the part where he lived in a _mansion_. Ichigo sat on a lacquered armchair that was probably worth more than his old man's clinic and tried to act a little less like he was trapped in a china cabinet.

Ryuuken, sipping his tea across the card table, looked like a long, cranky line of calligraphy. "Kurosaki Ichigo, to what do I owe the honor?"

Ichigo gazed up at the vaulted ceiling. The house had more in common with an art museum than a home: all crisp lines and negative space and a head-pounding aura of _do-not-touch_. But it _was_ a home—Ishida's, specifically—and Ryuuken hadn't killed him on sight. Things could definitely be worse. "I had a few questions."

"Such as?"

"Why doesn't Ishida have a cell phone?"

"Excuse me?"

"I mean, he _technically_ has a cell phone, if that's what you call a burner from the sketchiest shop in Karakura," Ichigo continued, relaxing as far into his seat as its stiff back would let him. "What happened? Is he grounded?"

Ryuuken set his mug down and folded his fingers in his lap. His posture would bring Yumachika to tears. "Your welcome ends with my tea. State your purpose."

Ichigo grinned. It was kind of hard to be afraid of someone who kept reminding him of his duly elected class president. "There's a lot of weird stuff going on. The way I see it, if you're still taking the time to ground your kid, you don't know any better than I do whether the world's about to head off the deep end."

"An interesting, but aimless, chain of thought. Why not ask me directly?"

Ichigo wondered what Ryuuken's reiatsu would tell him if he could see it. He pictured a slow, dense tide, a belt of lightning across a storm. "Because I don't think you trust me."

"I trust that you mean well," Ryuuken countered, lifting a shoulder in a half-hearted approximation of a shrug. "There is no love lost between the Quincy and Soul Society. My father was foolish enough to try and bridge the divide. He paid for his goodwill in this life and the next."

"Good thing I'm not a Shinigami, huh?"

"No," Ryuuken said, an odd note jamming the level cadence of his voice. His lips pressed together, like Ishida when he had his bow notched and a Hollow in his sights. "No, I suppose you're not."

Ichigo had the sudden and clear sense that he was being measured. He told himself that Ishida's childhood had left its mark on this big, empty place. He told himself that Ryuuken wouldn't have let him in otherwise. Ichigo leaned forward and held the silence between them as carefully as a piece of glass.

When Ryuuken smiled, it was like finding a well-worn handle on a porcelain set. "What do you know about your mother?"

...

The clasp of Byakuya's hand around her wrist brought Rukia out of her thoughts. She catalogued the bend in his knuckles, the hollow between his thumb and his wrist, waiting for the rest of the world to resolve into focus.

Renji looked between the two of them, the lazy slash of his mouth deeply unimpressed. He pushed open the door out of the First Division offices. "Well, you know where to find me," he called back as the door fell shut behind him.

Rukia, now alone in the jaws of her Honored Brother's grip, used the stillness that followed to temper her lungs. She also decided that Renji was a complete bastard. It was an open secret in the Eleventh Division that despite their captain's newfound sensitivity to the Thirteenth Division's vice captain, Kuchiki Byakuya was no better equipped to handle Kuchiki Rukia's moods than anyone else.

Byakuya's hand loosened on her wrist. "You are upset."

Rukia didn't know what to do with this version of Byakuya who was concerned with being her brother in more than name. In moments like these, however, she realized: neither did Byakuya. She tugged her wrist free and tried to polish the fondness from her smile. "You were kind enough to stake your clan's name on my word. I'm only upset that I failed to do it justice."

Byakuya shook his head. "The Kuchiki name is as much yours as it is mine. You wear it well-today, and always."

"Kind words, Honored Brother, but the fact stands. Captain Yamamoto is unmoved."

Lady Yoruichi would likely go so far as to call the curl to Byakuya's lips petulant. Rukia was not Lady Yoruichi, but even she could see the way displeasure made him look young. "The Gotei Thirteen would not abide the leadership of an easily swayed mind. Short of the Soul King's Decree, words will not move him."

The world, she considered, must look very different when rules were broken as a matter of choice rather than a way of life. It almost lent weight to the idle chatter that a nameless orphan had no place in a noble household. She pictured the two of them on opposite ends of a gulf, and tried to press the consistency of the water between into words. "Let me pose a problem. A mountain is dropped into your path. Do you turn back? Or do you climb?"

The planes of Byakuya's forehead creased. "I climb."

Rukia nodded, then grinned wide enough to be just a little unkind. It was the same smile she used before the academy, when it was her and Renji and the other district children and any day without an empty belly was a victory. It was a smile she had only recently started to let herself wear in her brother's presence. "I go around."

She could see the moment he caught her meaning, the bend of his arms across his chest like a suit of armor. "Renji is at your disposal," he said, at length, "but I suspect that would be the case even without my consent."

Rukia traced Sode no Shirayuki's hilt. There was no shred of remorse beneath, only the swollen howl of a blizzard. All the same, she could pretend. "I am sorry to be such a poor influence."

"On the contrary," Byakuya shook his head, eyes distant in a way that made her think he was half somewhere else. "Hisana used to say, 'Rules are no gods, and besides, men defy those too.'"

There was, she reminded herself, a reason that Kuchiki Byakuya had a reputation for leaving the hallows of tradition to hang. She wondered how much she was like the woman who lived in his mind. She didn't believe she'd ever get used to hearing him say her name-but if he was trying, so would she. "She sounds like an absolute delinquent," she whispered, her voice unruly and graceless.

"You have no idea. She ruined me completely," he replied, eyes bright now and on her in full. "Though It does bring to mind a question. For all that I wish to discredit the Captain Commander, his eye is keen. Tell me, have you spoken to Kurosaki Ichigo since Aizen's capture?"

Her head jerked up-entirely of its own volition-and she gave everything she had into finding a place for it in the series of steps needed to peer out at the gates marking the outer edge of the First Division. "No-no, I haven't. Though I must admit, Honored Brother, that your mind works in strange ways that one should make you think of the other."

The arch to his brow was, she noticed, unfairly pointed. "Does it now?"

"It does."

"Then I will have to ask you to indulge my mind in all its strangeness," he pushed. "You are my sister, Rukia. It would be a waste if you did not learn from me."

Rukia squared her shoulders. "Then speak plainly."

"If you decide you will only stand before someone in absolute perfection," Byakuya sighed,and if displeasure made him look young, regret left him suspended from the mouth of his grave, "it is as good as having bid them farewell."

Rukia contemplated the bitter pill he had set before her. She didn't see Ichigo as much these days, but what were a few months-however rash, absurd, clumsy ( _warm_ )-to centuries? There wasn't any cowardice to it-just an entire division to run and the way Karin had her brother's scowl. Just wave after wave of hollows and the half empty-thrum of the Kurosaki Clinic. Just an ocean run dry and salt all over her hands.

So, she didn't see Ichigo as much these days. Not when she was the reason he couldn't see her at all.

Rukia summoned a hell butterfly and watched it flutter aimlessly over the ground. "I'm not after perfection," she said. "I just want to stand in front of him with my head held high."

...

Karin had been wearing her big brother's shoes for over a year before her old man finally said something.

She shut the front door behind her, Tessai's bento still in hand. From the way Ichigo's school blazer was slung over one of the armchairs in the living room, he'd only just beat her home. Asshole. Of course he'd give her hell about making it to dinner on time and miss the whole thing himself. She could make out the clink of dishes and the open and shut of the refrigerator door. He was probably stealing her leftovers too. Her old man's shouts entering the fray was the only thing that stopped her from storming the kitchen on the spot.

"Look, Mother! Our favorite son! It's been so long, I thought he'd run away from us! Not that I don't think you'd make an excellent circus performer, Ichigo-I support and love you unconditionally-but I maintain that I would have every right to be upset if you didn't leave me a note."

Karin could practically hear Ichigo rolling his eyes. "Be serious, Goat-Face."

She moved in front of the stairs, tamping down her reiatsu and staying out of their line of sight. Ichigo leaned against the table with his arms crossed. Her dad had his back to the sink. The light from the kitchen spilled long stripes into the living room-tapering out just short of her feet.

"I'm always serious when it comes to you, Ichigo."

Ichigo's eyes flickered to the poster on the wall. "You want to talk, old man? Talk."

Her dad was still taller, but tonight, slouched into his threadbare white coat, it seemed like a kind of cosmic oversight. "I know that for the past two years, you've stayed in the top quartile of your class. You're in demand in a number of local sports teams, and if you put in the time, you might catch a recruiter's eye. You haven't, of course, but I still brag about you to Ryuuken whenever I can. You don't get into fights anymore, except when one of your friends is involved. You have a part-time job that isn't going anywhere, and I believe that's largely why you took it in the first place."

"Look," Ichigo broke in, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Let's not get into this, okay?"

Her dad's smile was iron, rusted and crumbling. "I'm your father, Ichigo. You'd think I'd have to stop reminding you by now."

She could see the muscles of Ichigo's jaw go tight. When he spoke, his voice was the distant whistle of cannon fire. "Why didn't you tell me about Mom?"

Her dad's knuckles washed white around the countertop, but he didn't look away. His reply was soft, strangely weightless in the space that set him apart from Ichigo. "Why didn't you believe me when I said it wasn't your fault?"

Ichigo scoffed, his words thick. "How was I supposed to know you were telling the truth?"

Karin wished she wasn't here to see this. It's not that she had ever thought her dad was perfect. She'd just always thought of him as her _dad-their_ dad-big and loud enough that she and Yuzu and Ichigo could miss their mom without getting lost in the full force of her not being there. Here, now, Ichigo was throwing her dad to the ground.

Ichigo shoved past her dad, out of the kitchen and straight into her. Ichigo blinked down, all his momentum stopped up, chest heaving. The reflection of herself in his pupils shook. She wondered if he was going to say something. She wasn't sure if she wanted him to. He stepped around her instead, scaling the stairs with rough, quick strides. The door to his room slammed shut as she entered the kitchen.

Her dad, hunched against a cabinet, was as still as the snapshots of her mom he had plastered across their tiny home. His eyes cut to where Karin stood, the smoke from his cigarette throwing glassy shadows against the walls. He stared at her the same way he stared at her mom's grave.

Karin realized that she didn't need to ask how long he'd known about her. He knew about all of them. "Oh, for fuck's sake," she said. "You're not going to start attacking me before breakfast now, are you?"

His laugh curled into his chest, his knuckles in front of his mouth. Karin tried to shake the sudden awareness that he had lived a whole life without her. "No, my, dearest, foul-mouthed daughter, I have no such intention."

"Right."

"I hear your skepticism, Karin," he said, patting the left side of his chest, "and I will let your mother know, in detail, how you wound your dear father's heart."

"That would be more believable if you didn't spend, I don't know, the past decade trying to punch your son in the face."

"Don't let your big brother's scowl fool you," he warned. His voice was airy and blithe, like a star without its core. "He is frighteningly soft. Frighteningly delicate."

She wanted to tell him that Ichigo's back didn't give off as big a shadow these days. She wanted to ask who that said more about. But what she said was, "And I'm not?"

"Oh, you are-without question! You just have the good sense to keep your heart inside your chest where it belongs. The circles under my eyes would be much darker if all three of you wore your hearts on your sleeves."

Karin couldn't remember a time when her dad looked young, but she could remember a time when he didn't look old. She squinted at her mom's face on the wall behind him and tried to imagine her dad, bright and unafraid, at her side. "I guess you don't have anything to worry about then."

"I have quite a few things, actually. You're still far too noble for your own good," he insisted, rubbing the salt and pepper stubble along his jaw. "I'll be fully grey by the time you're in high school. Not to mention you look just like her."

"Who?"

"Your mother."

Karin searched the poster, trying to pick out some part of herself from her mom's smile. She frowned. "No, I don't. I look like you."

He peered over his shoulder, considering. "You're right, of course. I just wanted to try saying it." He turned back to Karin and grinned. "You do take after her though."

"How?"

He told her.

Later-much later-Karin would admit it was kind of sweet. In a weird Romeo and Juliet meets Ragnarok kind of way. It didn't mean she'd forgotten that she was standing on a mountain after an avalanche. "You didn't tell Ichigo?" she asked.

Her dad's lips twisted. "Would you believe me if I said I never found the right time?"

"Dad, please."

"I decided that one war was enough for him," he sighed, all the air inside of him collapsing out. "Between your mother's family and mine, there's enough grief to fuel a thousand years of bloodshed. I hoped I could keep Ichigo from the claim the Quincy might lay to him." His eyes met hers. "No such luck with you, I'm afraid."

Karin lifted her chin. "Is that why you're telling me?"

"I thought I was doing the right thing-not saying anything. I thought I was enough to keep you safe. I just had no idea how bright you children would shine." He straightened, trailing his fingers along the table as he walked. Karin had seen Yuzu do the same thing-before tests, when Ichigo snuck out and didn't come back for hours-running her hands over her books, over her bedpost: as if she could ground herself using the physicality of where and what she was. "There are days I wish I had said something. There are days I don't want any of you to set foot outside of the house." He stopped beside Karin and let his hand hover over her head before dropping it to his side. "Masaki would laugh if she could see me. She'd ask, 'What sort of father tells his children to bury their heads in the sand?'"

Then he left.

Karin lost track of how much time she spent, head bowed, trying to remember how to make herself move, but Yuzu was waiting for her when she finally climbed up to the top of the stairs. She hugged Karin loose and light, like she was afraid Karin might break if she held any tighter. For that, Karin shored her forehead against Yuzu's collarbone and tried not to fall apart.

...

"Man," Keigo groaned, leaning against his locker. "No one tells us shit."

"Speak for yourself," Arisawa put in, because Arisawa was ruthless. If Keigo was stuck with her and an empty tank of oxygen at the bottom of the sea, she would let him drown just to teach him a lesson.

"Oh, so you got digs, Arisawa?" he challenged. "Did you chat up some dead people?"

"Didn't have to," she shot back, fiddling with her locker combination. "My friends actually talk to me."

Mizuiro came up and clapped Keigo's shoulder. "You are absolutely worthless to us and, by extension, Karakura Town and the world," he chimed, smiling like he was discussing his plans for summer vacation. He would probably be smiling like that at Keigo's funeral. "We're getting ready to vote you off the island."

"Un-fucking-necessary, man. Look, I tried, okay? Ichigo totally blew me off."

"You mean you tried to get him sub for the baseball team, and _then_ he blew you off," Mizuiro corrected. "You do realize if he'd done it, Kunieda would've fallen for him and not you, right?"

"You're the worst. That includes you, Arisawa," he decided. "I'm going to find new friends, and we're going to do cool things like singing karaoke and playing pachinko and not chasing around things that can eat us."

"Good luck with that," Mizuiro offered, rifling through his bookbag. "Hey, Arisawa, can I check answers with you on that chem problem set we have due at the end of the week?"

"Ugh, it sucked balls, but sure. I've already compared with Orihime so my stuff's mostly right."

"You're terrible people!" Keigo called out, turning on his heel and heading towards the safety of their homeroom. He peeked inside, and immediately discovered a grave error in his logic. Safety was an illusion, and all of humanity existed in a constant state of peril. Inoue would say he was being dramatic-it was _just_ Ishida-but if Arisawa had it right, Inoue had spent the better part of a week living with some dude who was literally trying to take over the world and waltzed right on back to class.

"Can I help you?" Ishida asked, crossing his fingers at his desk.

In that moment, Keigo developed a keen understanding of what it was like to be drunk out of your mind on a park bench when a cop waved hello. "Um, no? I mean, maybe?"

"Which is it?"

The classroom was empty except for their desks and the blaringly silent bubble around Ishida. Keigo was probably intruding on some kind of sacred Student Council President study time. Then again, he was _alone_ with _Ishida_. Keigo had a lot of questions re: the usual messed up shit in Karakura dialing up to eleven and Ichigo doing an even worse job keeping his sulking on the down low than usual. Also, if Mizuho's bald daydream was going to come waltzing back into their lives anytime soon Keigo really wanted a head's up. So like, not to be a hero or anything, but he was totally going to put himself in the line of the fire.

He walked over to Ishida's desk and took a deep breath. "Look, I know you don't want to talk to me. Some days I don't even want to talk to me. And that's okay because ninety nine percent of the time, the feeling's mutual. But like, I'm lucky if I hear Chad say a complete sentence to _Ichigo_ , and, I mean, I'm a mortal man, I might actually evaporate if I tried talking to Inoue-"

"Please tell me you have a point," Ishida interrupted.

"What the fuck is going on?" Keigo concluded.

Ishida rubbed the side of his forehead. "You'll have to be more specific."

That was when Ichigo hijacked the entire conversation by way of entering the classroom (trailed by Arisawa and Mizuiro, but at least Keigo and Ishida were on the same page that those two didn't deserve any kind of acknowledgment). Keigo could actually see the gears in Ishida's head shift before he hightailed it after Ichigo's carelessly whistling ass. Which, fine, Keigo knew he wasn't far from bottoming out the list of Ishida's priorities, but also, _rude_.

Ishida stuck his phone in front of Ichigo's face. "Explain."

Ichigo peered down at the screen "It's a finger guns emoji."

Ishida tucked his phone back into his pocket. "I'm aware. I'm asking why you sent it to me."

"I wanted to see if that bumfuck piece of hardware Urahara conned you into carrying around actually worked."

Ishida leveled Ichigo with a glare that had sent a number of potential suitors and a substantial portion of the school administration running for the hills. "Really."

Ichigo met Ishida's eyes like he was trying to find the best way to pick up a teething puppy. Though, to be fair, Ichigo's response to the aforementioned dude who was literally trying to take over the world had included waving a sword in his face. "Really. Actually, no wait, it's code. There are thirteen parts to the message. Every night, I'll send you a different emoji, and if you can figure out how to arrange them in the correct order-and he's walking away from me."

Ishida apparently made a habit out of leaving in the middle of conversations, because Ichigo responded to his exit by fist-bumping Keigo and throwing his bookbag in the general vicinity of his desk.

"Guys, Ishida's rich," Ichigo greeted, completely ignoring the fact that Ishida was still totally within earshot. "Like, _loaded_. This isn't news to just me, right?"

Tatsuki settled into her chair and pulled out her notebook. "You're just now figuring that out?"

"That's not why you're friends with him?" Mizuiro questioned, eagerly getting in on this alternate reality where Ishida could not, in fact, hear.

"Then why the fuck doesn't he have a cell phone?" Ichigo demanded, slumping into his seat. "Not even a smartphone! Just a regular cell phone!" Ichigo planted his elbows on his desk and ground the palms of his hands into his eyes. "Ishida could buy five smart phones," he muttered to no one in particular. "Ishida could buy smartphones for our whole _school._ "

Mizuiro patted Ichigo's arm. "Ichigo, you really want a smartphone don't you?"

Keigo took his seat behind Arisawa, and tried to move past the constant loop of _what the fuck_ that had taken over his train of thought. He lowered his voice so that only Arisawa could hear, since, you know, he still believed in things like decibels and tact. "Yo, Arisawa, does Ichigo seem, like, weirdly chipper to you?"

Arisawa tapped her pencil to her lips. "You noticed?"

Keigo gave Arisawa a narrow margin over Mizuiro in his running tally of who he hated more at any moment in time. "Um, wow. Could you act maybe a little less surprised?"

She shrugged, turning back to her notes. "He's always been a bad liar."

...

By the end of the day, Karin decided there wasn't really a good segway for the apocalypse.

She had initially planned to go to the Urahara Shop like a good little Quincy-in-training with grand designs of a) sharing her discoveries and b) kickstarting a mission to save the world. Then Yuzu pointed out that their dad's little history lesson meant that both Urahara and Ishida not only knew about what was going on with all the hollows-they'd been expecting it. _For years_.

"I'm sure they must have their reasons for staying quiet," Yuzu had contended. "You know, like Dad."

"That doesn't necessarily mean they're good ones," Karin had replied. "You know, like Dad."

Yuzu had scrunched her nose. "That's not fair and you know it," she'd scolded. "And, anyway, you won't know for sure until you find out."

So Karin had gone to the Urahara Shop with the revised plan of finding out the truth: namely, who knew it and how much of it they were willing to share. This, she was beginning to realize, required skills like finesse and subtlety-things that she didn't have the time for even on days when the fate of the world wasn't hanging over her head. Not to mention that Ishida had decided to play hooky on account of being in high school and Urahara was the kind of person who could make drinking tea look suspicious. She watched him bring the steaming cup to his lips after her training with Tessai, the rim of his hat shading his eyes so that only the gleam of his pupils shone through, and thought: case in fucking point.

Yuzu would probably disagree, but between picking a lock and kicking it open, Karin didn't see much of a difference. She breathed in the smell of matcha and walked towards him. "You knew my mom."

Urahara took a long sip and waved at her with his free hand. "She came to the shop every now and then," he acknowledged, not missing a beat. "Your father did too. It was horribly awkward waiting for them to realize they were in love. Yoruichi once locked them in a storage closet in the hopes that something would happen."

"Oh. Awesome," Karin said, which, she gave herself, was at least new ground as far as the history of interrogations went. It was probably unfair of her to expect Urahara to yell uncle after she told him her dad had let her in on the other family secret, but Urahara looked like they were discussing his latest stock of Soul Candy and not how long he had been keeping secrets about an impending war.

Urahara hummed an off-key melody into the silence. Then he took an axe to it. "Are you going to ask if I'm familiar with the King's Hymn?"

Karin wanted to take the element of surprise back for a refund. "Um. I mean yeah, that'd be pretty sweet."

"You're not very good at this, are you?" Urahara chuckled. "I did find it strange that your mother fell to a low level Hollow on the same day that nearly all the Uryuu retainers became too weak to stand. Fortunately, Ishida's grandfather was very passionate about building a trusting relationship between the Quincy and the Shinigami in those days. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the Gotei Thirteen's little spat with the Quincy was nowhere near the resounding success Soul Society believed it was."

"Then why didn't you tell us?" Karin felt like parts of her were escaping out from under her skin. "Chad and Inoue are killing themselves running after all these Hollows-"

"Yasutora and Inoue have no stake in any of this beyond what they take on themselves," Urahara interjected. "As for you, I had no intention of stepping in the middle of a family affair."

"But training Ichigo and me into Hollow fighting machines was totally cool, right?"

"Your abilities make it difficult for your father to train you himself. The same was true of Ichigo, at least when his powers first manifested." Urahara swirled his cup, watching the contents churn and settle. "As I recall, both of you came to me of your own accord. "

Karin barked out a laugh. "You know what? Fine. I don't care. There's a literal war that's about to happen. What are you going to do about it?"

"Did you ever wonder why I never went back to Soul Society?" 'Urahara asked, setting his tea to the side. "I wonder if you can see, Karin, just where you stand."

"Are you going to give me a map?"

Urahara pulled his lips into a thin grin. It made her think of how Rukia said that someone's smile was meaningless if you couldn't see their eyes. "There _is_ a war coming, and right now, you have the rarest luxury that anyone in it could ask for. You don't just get to decide who you'll fight for. You get to decide if you will fight at all."

Karin's eyes went wide, his words like a bullet train reeling through her bones. _This doesn't have to be your war if you don't want it_ , he was saying. _Set your mother and your friends to the side._

"It makes you angry to even hear, doesn't it? You're like Ichigo that way," Urahara observed, the edges of his grin softening. "Still, I suggest you sleep on it." He stood and began gathering the tea set to put away. "Tessai's waiting for you out front. Unless you had something else you wanted to discuss?"

Karin shook her head and wordlessly accepted the bento Tessai offered her at the door. She made her way home, doubling back through one street then another because she kept having trouble staring at anything but her feet. It probably didn't help that she was dealing with a huge spike in her baseline drive to punch Urahara in the face. That's how, she imagined, she ended up in front of the man under the streetlight, his reiatsu sealed inside his body so tightly she could barely catch a hint of it from three feet away. He looked like he had been dipped in white from head to toe, everything from his cape to his fancy coat to his military boots aggressively allergic to anything close to a color. He inclined his head toward her.

"I've been waiting for you, Kurosaki Karin," he said. "I was wondering if I could have a moment of your time."

 **A/N:** Thank you for your patience, and for reading! Some of you have written some really awesome comments, and I'll have you know each and every one of them warmed my alligator heart.

P.S. To clarify, both Ryuuken and Isshin basically told Ichigo and Karin the events of the "Everything but the Rain" arc, which I figured was kind of redundant to re-summarize in the actual chapter.


End file.
